The Publishing Solution fro PCS Technology Limited
 
  Introduction
 
    The process flow in the publishing industry starts with  gathering of Information comprising of news,
    articles, stories, etc., of national and international happenings by its reporters and from News
    agencies such as Reuters etc; Advertisements from Corporate and the public; Classified columns;
    Entertainment columns; etc.

    Once the information is gathered, it is collated, edited and then sent to the Printing press for
    publishing the same either on Newspaper or on Magazine or both.

    After the printing, newspapers and magazines are sent via the Distribution department on to its
    Distribution network in order to reach the stands and the readers at the earliest.

  Industry Segment

     Any publishing house that publishes Newspapers, Magazines (Weekly, Fortnightly Monthly or Annually)
    with an average circulation of more than 1 lac copies daily for newspapers where the major revenue
    comes from Advertisements from Corporate and the public. 
 
  The Challenge 
 
    The competitive nature of this industry today is just not limited to HOT News and Stories available
    early but also in managing cost of readership, apart from profitability.

    Hence an easily accessible, reliable, transparent and fast mechanism to execute the business process
    is the challenge, which can be only addressed by increasing efficiency level of Inventory Management,
    Advertisement management, Production Control and distribution Management.

  The Solution

    Keeping the challenge in mind, a very robust application backbone that could cater to all the challenges
    was developed by PCS Technology Limited (PCS) 

  The Applications 
 
    No effort has been lost in putting together a highly sophisticated but user-friendly system in order to
    help the industry meet its goals and objectives.

    The one of the application covered are as follows

    Circulation Management
      After the desired copies of the issue are printed, it has to be delivered to the end user using the chain
      of authorized agents and dealers.

      The onus of determining the number of copies to be printed for an issue, for a day lies with the
      circulation department. There are various tasks like updating supply orders requested by the agents
      on a daily basis and then generating a pre-print order that defines the number of copies of the
      main, sub and split editions for an issue. This process has to be in tandem with a lot of activities
      which have to happen in a sequence.

      The issues are bundled as per the drop points in a route for the taxi to follow. The Taxi management
      process plays a very crucial role in the distribution process as it necessarily depends on the timely
      arrival of taxis to the production house. All this and much more are handled by the circulation module.

The Development Platform

  The application has been developed on Microsoft DOT Net platform and the backend database is MS SQL Server
   2005. The system can be easily ported on to any backend database.

Customization

  Most of the publishing houses have very similar process and hence the application could be ported straight
  away to kick start operations immediately. The available solution can be customized to the client’s
  requirement wherever necessary.

  This package could be interfaced to available accounting packages.